If you’re at all a collaborative user of Evernote, then you’ve probably already heard. Starting Sept. 1st or so, Evernote will begin charging pretty much the equivalent of an SUV – per *year*. Seriously. Even if you just have a small handful of workers, you’ll need to pay between $10,000 and $20,000 per year just for the simplest Evernote ninja powers. Because we can’t afford to buy an SUV every year – just to remember a bunch of notes – we’ve been looking for a replacement. Hit “read more” if you’re interested in note-taking software.
Here’s our laundry list of “imperative features.”
- Must be accessible offline – including full search capabilities – for all users
- Must allow for teamwork – including real-time collaborative document editing
- Must be “affordable” (defining affordable as $600/year or less for a couple of users working together). (Granted: That might not be affordable for you.)
- Must allow for imports from the current note-taking engine you’ve *been* using. (3,000 notes in Evernote, in our case)
- Must be fast, even with thousands of notes
- Must be secure. Notes that shouldn’t be seen by outsiders can’t be seen by outsiders. Ever.
- Must be exportable – so you’ll have a parachute out of the new package if *it* should suddenly become untenable.
You might have other criteria. But these are our baseline benchmarks. Evernote just bumped out of the envelope on the “affordable” prong. So where should we go? The best front-runner for now is a little-known app called Affine. It seems to check all the boxes – and more. We’re still testing.
Check it out – and please let us know in the comments below if you find something that’s better. Thanks!
Microsoft onenote is quite good. I stopped using Evernote years ago when they started charging way too much even then.
I use both onenote and Samsung notes.
Samsung notes can be installed now in any windows machine
I quit Evernote when their prices first went up. As a single user, Google KEEP works fine, and it’s missionary-priced: FREE!
That’s what I switched to, too. It doesn’t work offline, but the realtime collaborative part is better than Evernote was. Not quite as many bells and whistles as Evernote had, though.
I too got out of Evernote a few years ago when they raised their prices. I eventually went with Apple Notes, which meets most of the requirements on this list although exportability to another platform is not very easy, apparently.
I’ve also dabbled a bit with Obsidian but didn’t really get into it. My daughter, however uses it and loves it. I have heard that it’s real-time collaboration is not all that great.
Like the others, I stopped Evernote when they started charging. Instead I discovered Joplin. It’s open source and totally free, as well as cross-platform.
I suggest checking out https://capacities.io. I have looked at all the competitors after abandoning Evernote. I also use a blog at blogger to post quotes that index’s it, too.
Capacities is a German startup with a freemium model that is like Evernote use to be.
Like others I was an avid user of EN until they priced it out of my reach. After trying several others I’ve settled on OneNote. Depending on how you define things it could check all your boxes. I would not say it’s real-time document collaborative editing is fantastic – all too often I end up with conflict notes that I have to go through and manually clean up.
OneNote is a wonderful online notebook – collaborative and easy to use.
I use Obsidian. Completely free, stores all notes in Markdown files, can use a shared directory (e.g. Dropbox, if need be), has gobs of plugins, has a sync if you don’t want to use Dropbox. I use Claude Code to interface with the same directory and have written an entire Scriptorium process which uses Python scripts to update, small LLM calls to surface daily summary emails, etc. It tracks several thousands notes plus (now growing) a PDF copy of every article the Roundup has ever linked, all completely searchable. Obsidian notes can be hypertext linked to each other. I use Git locally to store version changes, so nothing’s ever lost. Very simple and completely free (other than LLM charges) system to manage an entire Zettelkasten, and since it’s all stored in Markdown notes you’re not locked in to any software. (I exported from Apple Notes to Obsidian with pretty good ease).
It’s obvious that Brigada readers are active thinkers! : )
I had Evernote, and switched to free Zoho Notebooks. I really like it. But I also admit, I’m not a digital notebook power user. I use it occasionally, But it has all the functions I was used to in Free Tier Evernote. Plus it was simple to transfer my Evernote info over into. https://www.zoho.com/notebook/